Putting Canada’s Population in Perspective

Canada is a big country, the second largest in the world behind only Russia. But most of its 35 million people live in a very small area.

To see how small, follow the series of maps below.

Where do Canada’s people live? (size = population)

This is a cartogram, a map in which the area of each region is substituted with some mapping variable, population in this case. Said another way, the size of each region corresponds to the number of people who live there.

The bulk of the cartogram’s area, and therefore Canada’s population, is in the bulge on the right. And that bulge is predominantly made up of just three light-colored regions and their immediate surroundings: Toronto, Montreal, and Ottawa, Canada’s 1st, 2nd, and 4th most populous metro areas respectively.

A full half of Canada’s population lives here.

This region covers an area of roughly 50,000 square miles (about the same size as Pennsylvania), and all of it is located south of the Washington-Oregon border.

This next cartogram is the same as the one at the top, except this one has only two colored regions. Half of Canada lives in the red, half lives in the grey.

Most Canadians not only live in a very small area, but as the map shows, they also live further south than you may expect. The entire red area is located below the Washington-Oregon border.

I'm an NYC-based entrepreneur (my newest project: Blueshift) and adjunct instructor at UPenn. I'm fascinated by data visualization and the ways that data is transforming our understanding of the world. I spend a lot of time with my face buried in Excel, and when I find something interesting I write about it here and also as a Guardian Cities and Huffington Post contributor.More about my background

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Great trivia question: True or false, most Canadians live south of the 49th parallel. Answer True.

epistememe

I wonder if there is a greater population of Americans living north of this 50% of Canadians?

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Interesting question. Back of the envelope, there should be about 10m Americans living above the line (mostly in Washington state), compared to about 17m Canadians. Not too far off actually.

epistememe

Interesting, how did you come to this estimate?

epistememe

BTW, I really appreciate your work and skills.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

There are only a few states above the line. Washington has about 7 million people. The others each have a million or less.

William M. Johnston

I should add that the red zone is not entirely arbitrary. It covers most of the Great Lakes-St. Lawrence lowlands, which extend a bit outside the area further to the northeast. Immediately to the north of this land feature lies the Canadian Shield, which is unsuited to agriculture. Until you reach the Prairies out west just north of Minnesota, there is almost no arable land north of the red zone.

Back in the 19th Century, when most Canadians were farmers, it was easier to emigrate to the American Midwest than to reach the western parts of Canada where more farmland existed. Because of this geographical curiosity, Canada did not have an advancing line of frontier of settlement the way the US did. Our west didn’t start opening up until a railway was built in 1885 that blasted its way through the Canadian Shield and out into the west towards the Pacific. Much of our population was restricted to a small zone in southern Ontario and Quebec where farming was possible. This historical effect lives on in how the red zone continues to hold so much of our population.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Interesting. Thanks for sharing the history. Explains it well.

myconaut

Interesting. In fact, Portland, Oregon (45º31′), while technically below the line, is further north than Ottawa (45º25′), Toronto (43º42′) and Halifax, NS (44º39′), and is at approximately the same latitude as Montreal (45º30′). Portland proper has over 600,000 people, and the Portland metro area has over 2 million (including Vancouver, WA just across the border). This also makes Portland, Oregon the only major city in the contiguous USA that is outside of Washington and entirely north of the 45th parallel.

myconaut

Interesting indeed. In fact, Portland, Oregon (45º31′) is further north than Ottawa (45º25′), Toronto (43º39′) and Halifax, NS (44º39′), and is at approximately the same latitude as Montreal (45º30′). Portland proper has over 600,000 people, and the Portland metro area has nearly 2 million (including Vancouver, WA just across the border). This also makes Portland, Oregon the only major city in the contiguous USA that is outside of Washington and north of the 45th parallel.

I’m glad you’ve done a Canadian population cartogram. As I suspected, it is a massively distorted urban blob.

The reality of Canada is at odds with the mythology of Canada. Our self-image, and even more how the world sees Canada is replete with wilderness and rural touchstones. Lumberjacks, Mounties, voyageurs paddling canoes, Hudson Bay Company posts, hockey games played on ponds, and bush pilots come to mind. Many Canadian stories popular around the world, such as the Anne of Green Gables series, are set in quaint little towns far from the bright lights of the city.

But that Canada is “somewhere out there far away” for the vast majority of Canadians. Throw in the Vancouver area (#3 Metro), plus Calgary, Edmonton and Winnipeg, and fully 80% of Canadians are accounted for in just eight Metro areas. Yet our institutions do not reflect this reality. The Canadian federal government does not have a Ministry of Urban Affairs akin to HUD in the USA. Our constitutional arrangements involve federal-provincial consultations (reflecting how Canadian provinces are largely more autonomous than other sub-national entities in the world). But the federal government is largely absent from urban affairs.

This seems odd, since a regular sit-down between the prime minister and about a dozen mayors could encapsulate an enormous chunk of the population, and facilitate dialogue on transit, public health, housing and other urban matters that are central to the lives of Canadians. Not surprisingly, the ten provinces jealously guard their position as the interlocutors between cities and the feds.

Our institutions have not evolved alongside the evolution of the country into a highly urban entity.

http://metrocosm.com Max Galka

Interesting to hear that feedback from a Canadian. It certainly goes against my image of Canada, and I presume that of most Americans. But I wasn’t sure if Canadians were going to read the post and think, “no kidding, Sherlock!”

I’ve heard the urban-rural divide is especially pronounced in BC. Have been meaning to look into it, possibly for a future post.

57Dana

Canada has nothing like the Electoral College. The 2nd to last cartogram illustrates perfectly the biased political reality of The Confederation Mark Steyn called The Deranged Dominion. Voters west of Ontario are routinely informed that the General Election they are voting in was decided long before they cast their votes. And the West wants out.

William M. Johnston

Canada does not have a strictly population-based allocation of seats in the House of Commons either. The “Electoral Quotient” would be 111,116 people per seat if the 2015 seat allocation followed the 2011 Census closely. The Atlantic provinces are over-represented. PEI has four seats when a stricter population-based allocation would grant it two. Newfoundland has seven seats, when five would be more in line. New Brunswick would have seven seats, not 10. Nova Scotia would have nine rather than 11. Quebec is also somewhat over-represented, with 78 seats rather than 72.

All told, there are 15 extra seats east of Ontario than a stricter adherence to the population would result in. Ontario, BC and Alberta are close to the mathematical ideal, with 109,000 to 111,000 people per seat on average. Ontario’s 121 seats are mathematically in line. Considering that there are 338 seats in all, the eastern skew amounts to 4.4% from the ideal. The skew is declining over time, since no new seats are ever added in the Atlantic provinces because of their static population. In any case, the US Electoral College adds even more distortion in favour of low-population states. I wouldn’t hold it up as a improvement, since getting representation closer to a 1:1 ratio with population is more democratic.

The phenomenon of elections being decided before the polls close in the West is a product of population distribution rather than the 15-seat over-representation of the Atlantic and Quebec. BC and Alberta have 76 between them versus Quebec’s 78, and that gap has been closing each time the House of Commons is expanded. If the US Electoral College system were applied in Canada (with stricter adherence to population), PEI would have four Electoral College votes (2 MPs + 2 Senators) versus the four it actual has. BC would go from 42 to 44 and Ontario would have 123. You run the numbers and the West gains eight votes and the Atlantic loses just one vote (because of the senator rule). This wouldn’t result in a dramatic change to what we already have.

57Dana

Phenomenal response. Thanks. The genius of the EC, in the selection of a Chief Executive that does not write the laws but is charged with faithfully executing them, is that it requires that a majority of the participant Sovereign entities elect the CE. The flyover colonies were concerned back then of the raw democratic power large urban ridings can bring to bear, and they were after all creating a Republic, rejecting the Constitutional Monarchy. Our current PM has control of both the executive AND the legislative functions, and can pretty much do whatever he chooses, payouts to terrorists, gay marriage, legal weed, whatever.

Josh

Where can I find the actual cartogram image? It doesn’t appear to be on this post?

TypeKing

True nature border population people.

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